4info to Buy Butter

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=144584

Butter Acquisition to Spread Mobile Marketing Consolidation
Mobile Text-Message Company 4info to Buy App-Ad Firm, Signaling Industry Shift Toward One-Stop Shops

Butter, a mobile-marketing firm that connects brands and apps for content sponsorships.

With this latest deal, 4info is looking beyond its core business of text messaging, the highest-reach mobile media, to expand into branded apps that have become popular on smartphones such as the iPhone. Mr. Elkin points out that as more phones get access to the internet and smartphones continue to gain market share, investing in app advertising makes sense for a text provider.

4info plans to take its newly acquired app expertise to its 300 brand partners, which include USA Today and other Gannett newspapers, the NBA, Yahoo and Evite. Today, 4info sends nearly one-third of all content-based texts in the U.S., said Ms. Shumaker, adding up up to about 100 million texts per month. Butter, on the other hand, is on track to bring in 5% of app content-sponsorship ad revenue, she said.

"The next frontier is the opportunity within this ecosystem to be a single-source platform that's third-party, meaning agnostic for device, carrier and [operating system]," she said.
The details of the deal were not disclosed. Butter's four employees will join 4info's New York office. The deal is expected to close in July.